Space and Culture

Cheng+Snyder’s new public art project, the Museum of the Phantom City, offers iPhone users imaginative glimpses of New York City.

The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”

Or as Geoff Manaugh so eloquently puts it, “[Y]ou go around the city, iPhone in hand – a kind of architectural dowsing rod held in front of you – discovering the traces of buildings that never were (perhaps even fragments of a city yet to come)… You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you’re being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur, leaving messages for you (complete with call-back number). Electromagnetic voice phenomena in architectural form.”

[Image by Geoff Manaugh]

And benjamin_aguirre adds: “This is a fascinating platform for exploring the latent imaginaries buried under/embedded in/folded into the built environment, capable of mining a precise history of a site through its virtualities rather than/in addition to its actualities. The surfacing of the virtual here washes the city-as the project’s title aptly suggests-in the phantasmagoric and uncanny. ‘Here lies architecture, unbuilt’.”

As with Dan Hill’s projections in The Street as Platform, I find this blurring between the actual and the virtual very interesting. But I’m also taken by the possibilities of how projects and applications like these can actually reshape the city. For example, Matt Jones recently wrote in The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future that “although Archigram didn’t build their visions, other architects brought aspects of them into the world.” Since we know that world-building is complex and imaginary architectures manifest in different and often concrete ways, I wonder how digitally augmented realities may become actual, material realities. Along these lines, Geoff Manaugh also asks us to imagine a scenario where “crowds of tourists mill about on 13th Street, looking around at the imaginary buttresses of a superstructure you’ve spent three years digitally assembling.”

But the content of these imaginings is also crucial. Kazys Varnelis reminds us that “Archigram were fundamentally modernist at heart, eager to see their visions realized in a capitalist utopia but the Italian radicals set out to critique the system, exacerbating its operations in works that were more dystopian than utopian… [And] my fear is that some theorists have argued against critique and self-reflection for so long that a new generation doesn’t even have an inkling of how to practice it.”

Now critics do raise issues about access to technology, and the more negative or nefarious purposes to which the same technology can, and will, be put. But what isn’t at all clear to me is how the imaginary can be used as critique. I wonder how exactly might technologists, designers and citizens proceed to reimagine the city in more critical ways.

Any ideas?